{"book":"adl1197","page":179,"text":"- 160 -\nking of Persia did not give him the slightest assistance excus-\ning himself due to the treaty with the English which he had\nmade in 1857. A. D. and so gave a flat refulsal. Furthermore\nAbdul Ghafar Khan, the English representative at Meshad wrote to\nAmir Dost Mohamed Khan, informing the Amir of the neutrality\nof the Shah towards this struggle over Herat. The Amir had\nmanaged to convey the reply of the Shah and the English repre-\nsentative's letter to the beseiged Sirdar Sultan Ahmed Khan, and\nsent these communications to the Sirdar at Herat. The Sirdar sent\na reply to Amir Dost Mohamed Khan in these words of the Persian\nverse. \"What if we have no pilot for our ship! We have a God,\nand need no pilot!\"\n\nDespite the fact that the rigours and distresses of the siege\nincreased, the Sirdar did not give in the slightest degree in his re-\nsolve and purpose, and continued to defend the city. Overcome with\ngrief, the princess Nawab Dokhtar, the daughter of Amir Dost Mo-\nhamed Khan, who was the witness of this tragedy died during the\neighth month of the siege overcome by the strife between the close\nmembers of the family. The sad death did produce a certain amount\nof steadying effect upon the conflict. The bier of the princes was\ncarried out of the city, with the permission of the Amir and accom-\npanied by the lady's small son Abdullah Jan, was buried with the\nexpression of grief of her relatives at Guzargah. After the usual\nceremonies for the dead, and the return of young Abdullah Jan to\nthe city the siege continued. Lack of food and other difficulties of those\nbeseiged brought great distress upon the people. It is related that\nduring those days, Sirdar Sultan Ahmad Khan personally distributed\nfood and eatables to the people at the four corners of the\ncity every week, and used to encourage the people to resist, till the\nstores became empty. All that remained were the animals, and the\ndistress of the people was extreme, so that the Sirdar himself struck\nby the tragedy of the death of his wife, died after about a month\nand a halth. Once again the battle subsided and once again the\ngateway of Herat was opened and he was buried, all the Sirdars\ntaking part in the ceremony except the Amir; and the honour for\nthe dead was fully manifested by the lines of soldiers on the road.","chars":2308,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00179.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/179","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/179","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl1197/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl1197_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}